At last, ASEAN warms to Australia

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The proposal for a free-trade area is a vindication of Australian diplomacy.

So now we know for sure. Malaysia's former prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, really was the chief obstacle to closer relations between Australia and the Association of South-East Asian Nations, and his occasional public expressions of loathing for everyone and everything Australian were not a guide to anything much except the drift of his own mind. Last week, only six months after Dr Mahathir's retirement, trade ministers from all 10 ASEAN member states, including Malaysia, signed a communique proposing that they "upgrade economic relations" with Australia and New Zealand. The communique is not an invitation to join ASEAN itself, though it may one day lead to such an invitation. It is a proposal that ASEAN's free-trade area be brought into alignment with the free-trade agreement between Australia and New Zealand, in effect creating a single regional free-trade zone. In terms of economic output, the new zone would rival Japan, and in terms of the opportunities that would arise for Australia it would be of greater significance than the free-trade agreement with the United States.

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ASEAN's offer is scant on details; so far all that has been concretely proposed is a summit later in the year between the 10 ASEAN leaders, Prime Minister John Howard and his New Zealand counterpart, Helen Clark, to negotiate ground rules for the enlarged free-trade area. But to have achieved even this is a diplomatic victory for successive Australian governments that refused to be goaded by Dr Mahathir's rebarbative rhetoric. Australia could not have approached ASEAN as a supplicant, seeking admission on any terms: that would merely have elicited more scorn from Dr Mahathir. But neither could it have turned its back on ASEAN altogether. That would have given Dr Mahathir exactly what he wanted: a signal that Australians have never really overcome the legacy of their European colonial past, or accepted the reality of their geography. Instead, Australian ministers, diplomats and trade officials quietly consolidated bilateral relationships with individual ASEAN members while they waited for the Mahathir era to pass. And, now that he is gone, the ASEAN trade communique has vindicated their work.

The same caution ought to guide the free-trade negotiations, and, even more, any closer political alignment that may ultimately result from them. The prospect of finally being accepted as a full partner in the region is an enticing one, but if Australia is eventually invited to join ASEAN it should not do so on the basis that it refrain from criticising the poor human-rights records of several ASEAN members. ASEAN has in the past maintained solidarity by an unstated rule that its members should not comment on each other's internal politics. That has not been Australia's practice in other regional relationships that are important to us, however, and we ought to encourage the new willingness of some ASEAN members to challenge the rule of silence.